For those of you having trouble following the SCO/Linux situation, this summary of events might come in handy.

Been a bit quiet aronud here of late. Combination of long hours at work, being a bit under the weather, and starting to dislike the MT interface (and the way it makes me have to work) more and more. I have various bits and slips of paper and notes jammed in the Visor, about how I’d like a blog tool to work and what features I want; I’m just not sure when I’m going to have the time to start coding any of them, or what I’m going to use as test bed blog to try them out.

(This is all Rafe’s fault; he linked to some webloging software design specs and got me thinking about the topic; in thinking about the topic, I started considering all the things about MT that rub me the wrong way, and now I’m finding it hard to bring myself to use it. sigh It helps that I have a bunch of other stuff I need to do, most of which isn’t very interesting — so it’s more exciting to daydream about — err, I mean, draft design specifications for — an idealized weblogging system…)

Several performance-monitoring related links, since I seem to have been seeing a lot of this stuff recently:

• IBM’s Performance Inspector
• oprofile
• Linux Trace Toolkit

Via Mike Gunderloy’s Daily Grind (Mike’s been back for a while, and it’s been nice to hear his “weblog voice” again…), we have Levels Of Abstraction, which asks:

So if we are moving up a level of abstraction, from HTML to XHTML, I expect to lose someting and subsequenly get something else in return. And there’s the rub. What do I get in return for moving from HTML to XHTML? I already know what I have to give up, I have to have well-formed documents. Thus, no leaving those br tags open, and make sure all your tags nest properly, etc. And that well-formedness constraint means tools. Sure you can enter valid XML by hand, but if you want to guarantee that the code is well-formed you will need to check it against a tool. Maybe pass the document through an XML processor, or a tool like Tidy, but either way you need a tool. And if you want to generate not just well-formed XHTML but valid XHTML then you will definitely need a tool like Tidy. So what do I get in return?

The author conclues the essay/rant (rassay? essant?) in a non-pull-quotable fashion, concluding that you get nothing for your troubles. This, of course, isn’t true: what you gain in making sure you have valid documents of the latest spec is the ability to blame any display issues on the client side of the equation. There is nothing more sweet than the phrase, “Well, my HTML is valid, so it must be your browser”.

In the obvious irony department, the page fails to display correctly for me, with the left-side body text running into the right-side menu stuff; it probably goes without saying that the page is invalid.

Well, I’m no longer the number one hit for ‘SARS sequence’, but I’m still paying attention to the story.

The infection may be more lethal than initially reported. Given that it has (so far) disproportionately affected care providers, and that the people who pull through mostly require fairly intense treatment (nobody ends up on a vent for the joy of it), there’s the potential for a postive feedback loop here — once enough care-givers are out of action, the virus potentially gets more lethal.

I also sent in a reply to a a recent Politech posting this morning; don’t know if it will make it to the list or not. To do that, I had to Google up some quick info about the coronavirus family; I found this course page at the University of Leicester to be rather helpful, if a bit busy in the design department.

On a more humorous note, The Boondocks did a little “I got the SARS! story arc last week that was amusing in a Sanford-and-Son sort of fashion.

Earthquakes, tornados, and now we get word that God’s Official Spokesperson thinks our elected leader President is the Anti-Christ:

Bush’s blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs, and his constant references to “evil doers,” in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations - the anti-Christ. People close to the Pope claim that amid these concerns, the Pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations. John Paul II has always believed the world was on the precipice of the final confrontation between Good and Evil as foretold in the New Testament. Before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said, “We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel.” The Pope, who grew up facing the evils of Hitler and Stalin, knows evil when he sees it.

When asked for comment, sources inside the Beltway scoffed at the Pope, saying “Everybody knows the Anti-Christ is really Ari Fleischer.”

One of these days, I’ve got to get a real bookmark system going… for later usage:

Maryland Real Estate Valuation Database.

Gnus had the traditional May 1st release of a new version (it’s up to 5.10 now), and Lars Ingebrigtsen, the lead Gnus programmer, is selling Gnus t-shirts to mark the occasion.

Despite my calm, easy-going demeanor and my tolerance for my fellow human being (ha! I kill myself…), upon occasion I find myself involved in on-line discussions involving somewhat, well, controversial topics. Like why — just to pull an example out of the air, you understand — why the Republican party is overrun with fundamentalist religious wack-jobs.

Anyway, this budding flame-ware discussion that I’ve been participating in lead to me doing some Google searches, and I picked up the following links along the way.

Liberals Like Christ
Evil GOP Bastards

In the “why does real life continue to resemble the ‘Nightwatch’ story arc from Babylon 5?” category, did you know that yesterday was Loyalty Day?